A family comes in, is seated, and looks over that menu. Then one of the adults takes you aside and asks, “These prices -- wow! Can’t you do something to make our meal more affordable?”

“Well,” you explain, “We use only the best ingredients. We have to throw a lot away, because I insist on only serving what’s fresh. Add all the regulatory and business licensing requirements, and I’m keeping prices as low as I can, I assure you. But if you like, I’ll have the waiter recommend soup and salad for the young people, or a chopped-beef dish instead of steaks ...”

“What? No way!” your guest corrects you, evidently insulted by such a suggestion. “We want the same fancy food as everybody else. By ‘affordable,’ I simply mean we’ll pay you a third of the price, and you split up the rest of the bill among the rest of your customers, or send it to some government agency.”

Welcome to the new definition of “affordable,” as more commonly encountered nowadays in the euphemism “affordable housing.”

There are even magazines. I opened the mail recently to find a copy of the glossy, all-color 68-page publication “Housing for All Americans ... from the publisher of Affordable Housing Finance.”

It’s out of San Francisco.

The table of contents reads like the agenda for some awards ceremony: “Best Family Development,” “Best Historic Rehab/Preservation Development,” “Best Master-Planned/Inclusionary Zoning Development.”

There’s another code-word to be deciphered: “Inclusionary Zoning,” apparently, refers to the fact that a Colorado outfit called “Boulder Housing Partners” (sound like a private corporation? It’s actually the local tax-funded public housing agency) sold sites in its new “Holiday Neighborhood 27-acre mixed-use development” only to developers who would agree to make 40 percent of their units “affordable.”

Does that mean those developers were encouraged to build residential hotels featuring small private rooms with hotplates and common bathrooms down the hall, once dismissed by ivory-tower redevelopment types as “flophouses”? Of course not! That would be like expecting start-up families and unwed mothers to eat hamburger instead of tax-funded filet mignon!

Instead -- hold your breath and get ready for some gobbledygook -- while 195 of the 333 “residential units” in the project (they look like condos in the pictures) will sell for “market prices” of $300,000 to $760,000, “the 138 affordable units include 49 held by BHP and financed by tax credits, three held by Emergency Family Assistance for persons earning no more than 30 percent of area median income (AMI), and 86 units for sale to households earning up to 60 percent or up to 80 percent of AMI.”

Wait: there’s more. “The affordable for-sale units have deed restrictions to keep them affordable in perpetuity” -- thus vastly reducing the extent to which their “buyers” will realize any appreciation -- “and BHP’s tax credit apartments are split between 20 that are reserved for residents earning up to 50 percent of AMI and 29 for those with incomes up to 40 percent of AMI.”

Do they have to declare tips?

It goes on, but I’ll spare you.

Poor people got tired of living in housing projects for the poor, you see. They kept getting trashed by the, um ... poor people. So the idea now is to dilute or delay the trashing effect by integrating them in among working people who can afford to pay for their own housing, muscling bankers and builders into charging the “rich” people higher prices to subsidize some of their neighbors, and then daring them to figure out who’s who (bet it won’t take long), while the waddling bureaucrats (who would doubtless qualify for “assistance” themselves, if they had to find real jobs) stay busy quantifying everyone against that all-important AMI.

What on earth would they do without those income tax forms? Which reminds me -- the IRS won’t really confirm my income for these people, will it? I thought that was private.

It’s all enough to make you yearn to escape to that last sanctuary of free-market housing, the Sun Belt.

Oh, wait: Deeper into the magazine we find “Lucky Vegas Seniors Get Low-Cost Assisted Living” at some project for geriatrics who haven’t yet leeched enough off younger taxpayers called Silver Sky, with rent-plus-service fees from $550 per month (less than half of market rates.) Nor is the Grand Canyon state exempt, as a piece datelined Gilbert, Ariz. describes a barn-like dump-to-be called Page Commons with subsidized units renting for $277 a month headlined “Arizona: Not Just for Wealthy Snowbirds Anymore.”

My favorite article in the magazine, though, focused on the restored “Phoenix Park” development near Sacramento. It was headlined “Eminent Domain Helps Transform Project.”

Phoenix Park, it seems, was one of those bad old “overcrowded, crime-ridden” developments. Built in the 1960s as individually owned condos, the development “had become one of the worst in the city as absentee owners and ineffective homeowners associations failed to stem the theft, violence, drug dealing, and gang activity.”

The solution? The Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency (SHRA) seized 464 housing units from their private owners. “Some were rehabbed and some were torn down,” leaving 360 apartments for whose residents taxpayers proceeded to finance a 10,000-square-foot resident activities center, a swimming pool, and three laundry rooms.

The intricate list of the (at least) eight tax-funded agencies and government-controlled banks that provided the $100 million needed to set up these 360 “affordable” apartments -- from the California Multifamily Housing Program to the California Housing Finance Agency -- fills half a column.

Wow! “Affordability” can sure cost a lot once government gets involved, can’t it?

(What’s that? Banks aren’t now under de facto government control? Ever heard a modern banker say, “No, we’re not going to demand that our depositors give us their Social Security numbers -- those were never supposed to be for purposes of identification, anyway”?)

But where do you suppose the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency will find 360 non-violent, non drug-dealing, non-gang-susceptible, non-thief-tolerating, wholesome married families to occupy these spiffy new “affordable” units, on land seized and bulldozed from its previous, private owners?

Or does the plan merely rest on the assumption that folks who just rent will treat properties better than those who own them?

Oh, wait: not to worry. “The development ... features extensive security patrols, strict tenant screening, a keycard system for gaining access to the gated community (and) a zero-tolerance policy for rule violations.”

I get it: it’s based on an earlier set of California state institutions designed to provide “affordable housing” for the poor.

The prisons.